Segregation och utsatthet för egendomsbrott

Over recent years there appears to have been a trend towards an increased divergence between residential neighbourhoods as regards the ethnic composition and socio-economic resources of the residents. At the same time, it is striking that to date very little research in Sweden has attempted to study whether people’s living conditions are dependent on their situation as individuals, e.g. on whether they are rich or poor, or whether neighbourhood characteristics also affect individual-level welfare outcomes. As a means of developing our understanding of the significance of the residential neighbourhood, we have examined exposure to property crime, studying the extent to which differences in the risk of exposure to crime are related on the one hand to individual and household characteristics and on the other to neighbourhood conditions and differences in where people live. The data are drawn from interview surveys of living conditions, which also include a number of questions relating to criminal victimisation and fear of crime. These survey data have been combined with register data relating to residential neighbourhoods. The focus is directed at different districts in urban areas, grouped on the basis of accumulated resource deficiencies. For dwelling-related offences, the greater the level of resource deficiencies in a given neighbourhood, the greater the level of victimisation. Irrespective of the social group to which an individual belongs, there are marked differences between those who live in the most well-resourced and the most poorly-resourced neighbourhoods respectively. Exposure to vehicle-related crime, however, is not related to the level of resource deficiencies at the neighbourhood level. Here, instead, individual-level conditions and housing and house-ownership forms play a more important role.